No one ever mentions the fact that many schoolchildren loathed that beastly
bottle

When I was five, I betrayed my best friend. I’m still not sure why, but it probably had something to do with Polly’s raven’s wing of glossy dark hair and the fact she owned two rocking horses. I adored her, but the love was entwined with tendrils of envy. On that dark day in 1973, we were observing the daily ritual of morning milk break. The child-sized silver-tops of my school days were unpleasantly tepid, after sitting unrefrigerated since early morning. All too often there was a scum of cream on top and a thin, grey whey below. At home I’d only sip neat milk if it was mixed with strawberry Nesquik.

So I was filled with admiration when Polly tipped her entire bottle down the classroom’s large square sink when the teacher’s back was turned. At lunchtime I behaved as many cowards do in the face of boldness: I informed on her. When the confused child asked how the teacher knew, she replied, “A little bird told me.” It took another 30 years for me to confess the bird’s identity to Polly.

This episode came rushing back to me as I read a proof edition of Damian Barr’s brilliant memoir, Maggie & Me, which casts Margaret Thatcher as Barr’s helmet-haired, towering third parent. Damian and I might both be Thatcher’s children – albeit ones born eight years apart – but I didn’t expect to find points of common reference. After all, his dad worked at Scotland’s vast Ravenscraig steelworks (once Europe’s biggest plant, now earmarked for regeneration) while I grew up in the gin and Jag belt outside Sevenoaks.

However, the phrase “milk monitors” united us in a storm of Proustian recollection. Barr writes: “[school milk] comes in special triangular cardboard cartons with a tiny silver foil dot that you pierce with a red straw so thin you’ve got to suck your cheeks right in to get it going. School milk is not rich and cold and creamy… but you have to drink your milk.” I nodded my head; there never seemed to be any escape from this curdled monstrosity.

Sticklers for historical accuracy may now be questioning both my memory and Barr’s. After all, if “Maggie Thatcher milk snatcher” removed free milk from primary schools in 1971 when she was Education Secretary, how could I have been downing it two years later? And what on earth was Damian Barr doing getting his daily dose in 1984? I found myself so confused on this point that I emailed Barr (who was certain of his dates) and then got straight on to Google. Courtesy of John Redwood’s excellent blog, I discovered that the true story of milk’s exit from the classroom was far more complex than the accusatory ditty would have us believe. As Redwood writes, “The biggest 'milk snatchers’ were Labour.” Harold Wilson’s government removed free milk from all 11- to 18-year-olds in 1968, yet nobody vilified the then education secretary, Ted Short. Three years later the Heath administration took away milk from 7- to 11-year-olds in England and Margaret Thatcher was singled out for everlasting blame.

Meanwhile, infant classes carried on drinking the filthy stuff until around 1980 (there were no loud protests when it petered out). In Scotland different measures applied, which was why Barr was still drinking milk aged eight, until the day his teacher announced: “The Prime Minister of England has stopped free milk in schools down there and now she’s trying to stop it up here as well…”

Yet as I listened to Monday’s recollections of Baroness Thatcher, the milk thief tag came up time and again. Not only is it untrue: no one ever mentions the fact that many schoolchildren loathed that beastly bottle. Indeed, I have always felt that Thatcher helped liberate children from the tyranny of “drink it all up!” But then no politician championed personal freedom as fiercely as she did.